Power resources in the public sector employment relations

Whilst internationalisation and globalisation have to a large extent disciplined trade unions in the private sector, public sector employment relations have been the hotbed for labour unrest in most advanced economies for the past 20 years. Power Resource Theory provides a useful tool to analyse and understand these developments, but we need to adjust our analytic apparatus to better suit a public sector context to do so. In this chapter, we consider the greatest differences between public and private sector: the nature of the labour-capital antagonism, the nature of work, and the nature of employment relations. We argue that public sector work provides employees with a certain “shelterbility” that enables the use of certain power resources and disables others, to the extent that the work is inherent to providing public goods. The power resources available to the unions representing employees in the various forms of public sector work also change depending on how sheltered their work is. We show how the level of shelterbility depends on several factors and varies greatly between public sector professions and work. Low-skilled public sector jobs like cleaning or cooking have low shelterbility and can easily be outsourced. We conclude by providing an overview of how power resources functions in a public sector setting, useful for anyone studying temporary public sector employment from a power perspective.